[LINK] Ebooks and the future of publishing

Michael Still mikal at stillhq.com
Sun Feb 8 04:43:18 AEDT 2009


Ok, so the threads on ebooks and the future of publishing have been
interesting. I have a vested interest in this field and thought I should
comment...

I've had two technical books published -- "The Definitive Guide to
ImageMagick" and "Practical MythTV", both through Apress. Apress is a
delight to work with, but the reality is that technical books simply
don't make money any more. In fact, it would have been a better
commercial decision on my part to spent those hours working at Walmart
or something.

This affects the publisher's choices about what books to produce. If the
book isn't a slam dunk, then its much harder for them to justify the
production expense and risk. That's why you see so many technical books
about Microsoft Word and so on -- everyone is pretty sure those books
will sell.

This risk adversity affected me personally when I couldn't get a second
edition of "Practical MythTV" accepted. This is despite the book being
through several reprints, and getting good reviews.

So, I was left with the following situation:

 - authors generally don't make much money for technical books
 - the market is small, and number of units shipped is low
 - a lot of books don't get past the proposal stage for commercial reasons

What I've therefore done is decided to give up the royalty income
entirely, and instead put the book online for free. The actual
publishing mechanics still try to mimic the "professional" book world --
the book is a wiki, and anyone can create a chapter, but that chapter
has to go through a copy edit and a technical edit before it is allowed
to be marked as an "official" chapter, or be linked into the table of
contents. That's a bit like a code review for a open source software
project I suppose.

The book is available from http://www.mythtvbook.com , although it is
currently only about 25% done. Despite not being complete it currently
gets around 40 unique visitors a day, and when announced peaked at a
little over 100 unique visitors in a day. I suspect that's more people
than actually picked up a book off the shelf to have a look, although I
don't have a lot of data on that.

I guess I'm lucky enough to be able to lose the income from the book and
pursue this as a hobby, but it will be interesting to see where it ends up.

So what do I think the future of publishing is? I think we'll see more
content being produced this way by new authors without a large
following, probably on niche topics. Things like PoD and ebook readers
will mean that you'll still see those books in people's hands, but it
requires more intent from the reader. Established authors will continue
to use the traditional route, as that's where the money is.

Mikal



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